Today, many organizations store their data in organization-wide databases. Often, the data stored is very sensitive and may contain commercial secrets, costumers' personal data, or otherwise sensitive data which may cause serious damage to the organization if leaked.
The danger of data leakage grows where the organization has geographically separate offices that connect to the organization's database with the use of regular internet infrastructure.
To mitigate the risk for compromising sensitive data, amongst various data security provisions, many organizations encrypt their databases using encryption-directed database management systems. Such systems enable the organization to encrypt and decrypt the data with the use of various known algorithms.
In most encryption methods, secret keys are used to decrypt and access the encrypted data. The database management systems enable the creation, storage, retrieval and security of the keys which serve for encryption of all data within the encrypted database.